• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

“My aunt is going to kill me!” Zetha muttered. “It was her favorite.”

“Has your aunt truly slept through all this uproar?” Jarquin wondered, looking down at the girl with a smile. Skinny little thing, he thought, but those eyes-!

As if in answer to his question, the door to the sleeping quarters opened partway, and a tousled-looking Selar appeared, wearing a sleeping robe of the most luxurious Tholian silk drawn directly from their inventory. The neckline was cut invitingly low, and she held it halfway closed with one enervated hand.

“Citizen Jarquin? What are you doing here?” she asked with a bewildered smile, as if she might be dreaming and he, realizing at last that this really was beyond the bounds of propriety, merely nodded and hurried toward the transporter pads, his guards in tow. If he heard Selar’s reaction to the discovery that her “niece” had broken her favorite vase, he paid it no mind. Romulans, after all, were noted for their tempers. Everything was as it should be.

Albatross was light-years out of Quirinian space before Sisko trusted himself to laugh out loud. “I’m beginning to think that, all your rationalizations notwithstanding, Vulcans are more adept at lying than humans! I heard you back there. You lie like a rug!”

His laughter masked the sense of futility they all felt. The stains on Selar’s clothing were the closest Sisko had come to the reality of this thing so far, and he wondered if there was any point in going on, deeper and deeper into the Zone, increasing the odds of being challenged by friend or foe. Didn’t they have enough evidence by now to connect this disease to the Romulans? And so what if they did, if there was no cure?

He couldn’t get the thought of all those dead out of his mind, and naturally any such threat turned his thoughts toward Jake and Jennifer. The concept of anything so awful even touching his family filled him with such despair he wanted to hit something. So he joked instead.

Tuvok, perhaps sensing his gloom, managed to look properly indignant.

” ‘Lying’, Mr. Sisko? Having done as much research as is possible into Romulan tax structures, given the silence between us, I assure you that the fictional merchant Leval certainly could encounter precisely such adversities in his effort to support himself and his family.”

“Oh, so you’re writing fiction now! Maybe you should submit it to a publisher. Or write a holodrama. You and Zetha scuffling with that honor blade was one of the best performances I’ve seen in my life. Come to think of it, Selar did a damn fine job of looking like she’d just rolled out of bed, too. I’m surrounded by talent! Which reminds me…”

He went looking for Zetha, who was as usual in the lab assisting Selar. He didn’t say anything, merely stood there with his hands out, palms upward.

Zetha, gauging his mood, fished in a pocket and handed him the master control device without a word. Selar, restored to her prim and proper self, was testing monocyte chemotactic peptide recruitment in the specimens gathered on Quirinus, but found time to watch what was going on.

“I’m not going to ask you where you learned to pick pockets like that,” Sisko said. “I’d probably only embarrass myself for letting you get away with it.” He sighed; his features softened. “But I did want to thank you. You saved our lives.”

Zetha shrugged. “My own primarily. If Citizen Jarquin had seen through our ruse, it would have meant my life as much as yours.”

Sisko cleared his throat, started to say something, wondered what it was. Compliments rolled off her as readily as criticism. Was there any way to get through her shields? To his surprise, she greeted him with one of her rare smiles.

“Does this mean I’m allowed to watch the stars on the forward screen without your permission?”

His eyes narrowed. “All right. But keep your hands out of my pockets!”

“I should thank you as well,” Selar said quietly when Sisko was gone. Zetha gave her a puzzled look. “For destroying the vase.”

“I thought you’d be angry.”

“It was aesthetically pleasing,” Selar said